Notes from the Golden Orange

EppsNet Archive: Women

A recurring theme in world history is the United States dick-slapping Germany: World War I, World War II, “Tear down this wall!” … maybe that’s not the most appropriate metaphor for a women’s soccer match but we’ve been winners all our lives.

I will mix me a drink of stars,—
Large stars with polychrome needles,
Small stars jetting maroon and crimson,
Cool, quiet, green stars.
I will tear them out of the sky,
And squeeze them over an old silver cup,
And I will pour the cold scorn of my Beloved into it,
So that my drink shall be bubbled with ice.

It will lap and scratch
As I swallow it down;
And I shall feel it as a serpent of fire,
Coiling and twisting in my belly.
His snortings will rise to my head,
And I shall be hot, and laugh,
Forgetting that I have ever known a woman.

That’s the title (minus the quotation marks) of an article on politico.com regarding Rolling Stone‘s retraction of a story about a gang rape at the University of Virginia. The article is written by a female student at that university.

“We” believed the story for the same reason Rolling Stone didn’t fact check it: because when you know little, it’s easier to fit everything you do know into a simple story about the world, e.g., “white men are rapists.”

Also because people can maintain an unshakable faith in any proposition, however absurd, when they’re sustained by a community of like-minded believers.

On the flip side, a different group of people can now use the incident to confirm their simple story about the world, e.g., “women are liars.”

Personally I find labeling and smearing people based on genetic traits ugly and offensive no matter whose agenda is being advanced . . .

There is the soft and willing and alcoholic blonde who doesn’t care what she wears as long as it is mink or where she goes as long as it is the Starlight Room and there is plenty of dry champagne. There is the small perky blonde who is a little pal and wants to pay her own way and is full of sunshine and common sense and knows judo from the ground up and can toss a truck driver over her shoulder without missing more than one sentence out of the editorial in the Saturday Review. There is the pale, pale blonde with anemia of some non-fatal but incurable type. She is very languid and very shadowy and she speaks softly out of nowhere and you can’t lay a finger on her because in the first place you don’t want to and in the second place she is reading The Waste Land or Dante in the original, or Kafka or Kierkegaard or studying Provençal. She adores music and when the New York Philharmonic is playing Hindemith she can tell you which one of the six bass viols came in a quarter of a beat late. I hear Toscanini can also. That makes two of them.

Who the heck is Olivia Wilde and why is there a photo all over the Internet of her breastfeeding an infant in a restaurant booth? I mean, not a surreptitious candid photo of her discreetly breastfeeding. A posed photo! In a designer dress!

(I’m not posting or linking to the photo. If you haven’t already seen it, I’m sure you can find it.)

Well it’s a natural function, breastfeeding — right? Yeah, but there are a number of natural functions that need not be performed in public and photographed.

An ovulating female chimp, that is. Nearly all female primates advertise their days of fertility with colorful genital swellings.

It seems like a useful indicator for humans trying to have babies or trying not to have babies, but for some reason evolution has seen fit to conceal the reproductive state of human females from observation.

Everyone can shut up about “let’s get more women into leadership positions.” Because they don’t want leadership positions. Or they’d get them. Obviously. Women want to have time for their kids. And leaders – especially top-down leaders – dedicate their lives to their work. There won’t be female leadership and male leadership. There will be people who lead at home and people who lead at work. People will take ownership of outcomes for the areas of life they care most about.

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The home crowd of the Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks is known as The 12th Man. Isn’t this awfully sexist? Doesn’t it marginalize female Seahawk fans? Wouldn’t The 12th Person be a more appropriate appellation?

I’m surprised there isn’t more outrage over this. It seems like the kind of thing that someone should be really bent out of shape about.

According to this recently published research paper, women aren’t interested in computer science because of media portrayals like “The Big Bang Theory,” in which technologists are depicted as socially awkward, interested in science fiction and video games and physically unattractive.

If that seems like a compelling line of reasoning, you can read a more complete write-up in this WSJ.com article.

What I’ve never been able to figure out is why people are so interested in why women aren’t interested in computer science . . .

I saw this photo today on Facebook with a comment added by the poster: “She was a size 12.”

I’m an empiricist. Maybe “empiricist” is a polite word for what I am. I hate things that don’t make sense.

Marilyn Monroe being a size 12 is one of those bits of misinformation that lives forever because a lot of people would like for it to be true. And yet, anyone who’s ever seen Marilyn Monroe — her full figure — in a movie or photo would notice that she had a very small waist and was obviously NOT a size 12.

So I commented that while Marilyn’s point is well taken, on her worst day she was not a size 12.

The original poster replied, “Of course none of this is verifiable at this point, but your comment does not help empower those who are inspired by this ‘fact,’ no matter how true it is. Point is, girls/women who don’t fit the unrealistic supermodel form need to have something to reinforce a more realistic view of women, and of success. By unnecessarily giving your “correction” about how there is NO WAY someone that hot could be a 12, you are in essence proving my point about how, to men, dress size determines desirability. Such men, as the oppressors and the ones who, undeservedly, create the social values that drive our society, need to be met with some strong and intelligent women who challenge their definition and labeling of women.”

[Insert cuckoo clock sound effects here.]

We can feel better about ourselves without actually losing weight or getting in shape if men would just let us pretend that Marilyn Monroe was a size 12.

Look: if you want to be with guys who like thin girls, then you need to be thin. Otherwise, stop worrying about Marilyn Monroe’s dress size and what other people think about the way you look. And stop blaming men for your problems in life as though “men” is an actual group of people who’ve all agreed to think and act the same way.

In other empowering news, Albert Einstein actually had an IQ of 68. He was a total fucking moron! It’s empowering so it doesn’t have to be true.

EppsNet stands behind Joyce Carol Oates in this Twitstorm, in opposition to those who think that while raping women may be a bad thing, what’s really deplorable is freedom of thought and questioning theocracy. In solidarity, we publish a couple of previously unseen (because they’re terrible) photos of the two of us taken with Mark Twain in the Doe Library at UC Berkeley.

He doesn’t offer any evidence to support that. He just looked around and noticed more men than women in the high-tech workforce.

The fact that there are more members of Group A doing X than there are members of Group B doing X is not evidence that members of Group B are being discriminated against in their efforts to do X.

In particular, he says that only 3 percent of tech firms in the Valley were founded by women, as though founding a tech firm is a fun thing that everyone should want to do.

Founding a startup is an ultra-high-risk activity that requires insane amounts of time and sacrifice. Do you want to have friends? A social life? Do you have a family? Do you want to have a family? Do you want to see them sometimes?

The fact that more men than women are founding startups is not evidence that women are being discriminated against. The simplest explanation is that women just don’t want to do it as much as men do.